Tragedy and Recovery

1967

Nestled beside an umbilical tower, surrounded by a service structure,
and encased in a clean room at Cape Kennedy's Launch Complex 34,
spacecraft 012 sat atop a Saturn IB on Friday morning, 27 January 1967.
Everything was ready for a launch simulation, a vital step in
determining whether the spacecraft would be ready to fly the following
month. During this "plugs out" test, all electrical,
environmental, and ground checkout cables would be disconnected to
verify that the spacecraft and launch vehicle could function on internal
power alone after the umbilical lines dropped out.1

By 8:00 that morning, a thousand men, to support three spacesuited
astronauts - Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee - were
checking systems to make sure that everything was in order before
pulling the plugs. In the blockhouse, the clean room, the service
structure, the swing arm of the umbilical tower, and the Manned
Spacecraft Operations Building, this army of technicians was to go
through all the steps necessary to prove that this Block I command
module was ready to sustain three men in earth-orbital flight.
Twenty-five technicians were working on level A-8 of the service
structure next to the command module and five more, mostly North
American employees, were busy inside the clean room at the end of the
swing arm. Squads of men gathered at other places on the service
structure. If interruptions and delays stretched out the test, as often
happened, round-the-clock shifts were ready to carry the exercise to a
conclusion. Throughout the morning, however, most of the preparations
went smoothly, with one group after another finishing checklists and
reporting readiness.

After an early lunch, Grissom, White, and Chaffee suited up, rode to the
pad (arriving an hour after noon), and slid into the spacecraft couches.
Technicians sealed the pressure vessel inner hatch, secured the outer
crew access hatch, and then locked the booster cover cap in place. All
three astronauts were instrumented with biomedical sensors, tied
together on the communications circuit, and attached to the
environmental control system. Strapped down, as though waiting for
launch, they began purging their space suits and the cabin atmosphere of
all gases except oxygen - a standing operating procedure.2

1. Much of this chapter is based on
Report of Apollo 204 Review Board to the Administrator, National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (Washington, 1967), Floyd L.
Thompson, chairman, 5 April 1967, with appendixes A through G (hereafter
cited as RARB). Also basic are Senate Committee on Aeronautical and
Space Sciences, Apollo Accident: Hearings, 8 parts, 90th
Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., 7 Feb. 1967 to January 1968, and House
Committee on Science and Astronautics, Subcommittee on NASA Oversight,
Investigation into Apollo 204 Accident: Hearings, 3 vols.,
90th Cong., 1st sess., 10 April to 10 May 1967. See also Senate
Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Apollo 204 Accident:
Report, 90th Cong., 2nd sess., 30 Jan. 1968, S. Rept. 956.